Rifles - Mark Urban [159]
Even the formation of the Rifle Brigade, however, did not completely protect it: the 3rd Battalion was wound up a couple of years later. This event helped to ensure that George Simmons, who had written to his parents in 1810 that a man could get his company in five years in the Rifles, did not achieve that goal until nineteen years after he entered the regiment – despite all the suffering that attended his service.
In the meantime, the 1st Battalion returned home in November 1818, losing many veterans before being sent first to Scotland and then Ireland to protect the ministry from the anger of the mob. Although these were simply the exigencies of the service, none of the old sweats could pretend that keeping rioting Celts in check was a particularly pleasing occupation.
Ned Costello was among those invalided out of the regiment – aged thirty-one, he was awarded the miserly sum of sixpence a day. He later married, but finding the money insufficient to keep him, he ended up volunteering to fight in a British Legion which took part in the Spanish civil war in 1835. Costello’s previous services qualified him for the rank of lieutenant in this mercenary force, and he returned to England in 1836. A year and a half later, Costello’s difficulties in maintaining his wife and seven children finally came to an end with his appointment as a Yeoman warder at the Tower of London.
Many of the private soldiers who had served with Costello were a good deal less fortunate. Several succumbed to drink, becoming penniless drifters, begging beside the roads. Tom Plunket, the man who killed the French general during the Corunna campaign and was held up by his colonel as a ‘pattern for the battalion’, was sighted years later selling matches on the streets of London. In his case, the best efforts of that old commanding officer to obtain him a good pension failed to save the old soldier from alcoholism.
George Baller was another veteran of O’Hare’s company whose fate gives some insight into the pitiful circumstances into which many of the old 95th men fell. Baller was one of the hard core of the regiment, having been given the skulker Esau Jackson’s stripes outside the walls of Badajoz in 1812. He was invalided out in 1816, while the regiment was still in France, aged just twenty-eight. Baller had attained the status of colour sergeant but could not carry on due to the severity of his five wounds. One month after his discharge Baller was awarded a pension of ninepence per day by the board at Chelsea. Once married, Baller found himself too sick to work, with a pension too small to provide for his children. He ended up making a desperate appeal to the Chelsea board for more money in 1819. Baller’s exact fate is unknown, but it is clear that despite the most exemplary record, and testimonials from Andrew Barnard, he lived what remained of his life in grinding poverty and great physical pain.
As the years of the 95th’s great Peninsular fights receded, so those who were still fit and serving in the regiment found themselves living, as they had before the war, according to the petty routines of a peacetime army. For an officer like Jonathan Leach, who personified the ‘wild sportsman’ of those campaigning days, this was all too much. ‘I feel no particular penchant for passing the remainder of my days in marching off guards, going grand rounds and visiting rounds and performing other dull, monotonous and uninteresting duties of the kind, on which great stress is laid, and to which vast importance is attached, in various stiff-starched garrisons,’ he wrote. Leach resigned from the Army with the rank of lieutenant colonel to pursue other business.
Those with less wealth did not have this option. While serving on in the Rifle Brigade, Robert Fairfoot committed himself to raising a family,